Happiness is a chemical OPINION: Ruth Ostrow | September 27, 2008 More real and more sustainable is contentment. As one contented person told me: “I find pleasure in simple things nowadays. My life isn’t thrilling, but it’s deeply satisfying.” Perhaps as a species we need the quest for the Holy Grail to keep us performing. But for me and many other recovering happiness junkies, the thing we most crave now is an end to the craving. Contentment is the road home.
"I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town." - Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal
How to ... be content Saturday September 27 2008 Happiness is a fine marmalade but contentment is a citrus grove. Children are naturally content because they don't know any different. It's the knowledge of difference that breeds discontent and it's when you finally realise that difference makes no difference that you can reclaim contentment. ...It may sound dull, but being content is a profoundly radical position. It means you have no outstanding needs that other people, events or corporations can satisfy. You can't be manipulated, corrupted, conned, heartbroken or sold unnecessary insurance policies. ...Being happy with your lot seems to be the essence of contentment. ...Restless discontent is often held up as the great wellspring of personal and artistic progress. ... It's worth remembering your lot can quite easily be an epic struggle against overwhelming odds but, even if it is, you can still be content with it.
"our political views may be an integral part of our physical makeup" 18 September 2008 By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service "... physiological responses to a series of images and sounds ... people who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda .... were more easily startled ... these political positions were protective of the volunteers' social groups"
Author analyses consequences of deregulation 18 September , 2008 MARK COLVIN: The Canadian writer Ronald Wright, whose latest book is "What is America?" says the current financial crisis has roots deep in the last decade of deregulation.
A world of inequality September 18 2008 As economies slow down, people in the developing world who did not gain from the boom will face deteriorating conditions.... Contrary to general perception, most people in the developing world did not gain from that boom.
Exploiting Poverty Caused The Financial Crisis September 18, 2008 But instead of prioritizing poor and even middle class families who are increasingly struggling, our government is spending billions and billions to bail out the Wall Street firms that created this crisis. Instead, we should be spending our taxpayer money to help the families who were taken advantage of in the "anything goes" unregulated financial system that years of misguided never-really-did-trickle-down economic policy created.
Wall St rallies, Bush vows more action Sep 19, 2008 Wall Street staged its biggest one-day rally in six years overnight as US President George W Bush vowed his administration would meet the challenges of the global financial crisis and the US Federal Reserve injected $US180 billion ($224 billion) into the banking system.
McCain Says U.S. Should Let AIG Fail to Prevent `Moral Hazard' By Nancy Moran Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Republican presidential nominee John McCain said the U.S. government should let American International Group Inc. fail to prevent the financial burden from being placed on taxpayers.
House Republicans Criticize U.S. Action on Crisis (Update3) By Brian Faler Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- ...``These massive federal bailouts have exposed taxpayers to literally tens of billions of dollars of new risk,'' and created a ``moral hazard where companies are absolved, not punished, for excessive risk taking,'' the letter said.
Bailout raises moral issues By ROBERT J. SHILLER Sept. 15, 2008 ... Is it fair that innocent taxpayers must now pay for their mistakes? ... The world is discovering capitalism and its power to transform economies. But capitalism relies on good faith. A perception of unfair treatment can be deadly to economic growth, because it means that people will lose trust in businesses, and hence be less willing to offer to them their precious capital and labor. Is that outcome morally superior to a bailout?
Where’s the Prosperity? Published: August 26, 2008 A closer look confirms what Americans already know: most families reaped none of the benefits of the previous six years of solid economic growth. Median household income last year was still 0.6 percent less than it was in 2000 ... The number of people living under the poverty line rose by 5.7 million since 2000, to 12.5 percent of the population. And the number of impoverished children increased to 18 percent.... What is clear is that economic growth alone will not cut it for most American families. The benefits must be shared more broadly. This means more progressive taxation, increasing access to affordable health care, investing more in public education.
Wall Street crisis raises questions over IMF inaction The International Monetary Fund has in the past been accused of treating rich countries with kid gloves. Its critics had a point Mark Tran guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 18 2008
In hard times, tent cities rise across the country By Evelyn Nieves Font Scale: Posted 19 September 2008 Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they've experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report's release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening. "It's clear that poverty and homelessness have increased," said Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition.
Fear shrivels US Geoffrey Garrett September 19, 2008 The halcyon days of high-paying, secure jobs in steel, automobiles and other American manufacturing industries are long gone. It is no surprise that the immediate reaction of the candidates to this week's bloodbath has been to rail against the Bush administration as aiding and abetting the gargantuan excesses of the super elite gambling away the country's hard-earned money on the Wall Street casino.
. Slum tours: a day trip too far? May 7 2006 A new travel experience gives visitors a glimpse into the harsh lives of Delhi's street children. But is it a worthy initiative or just an example of voyeuristic 'poorism', asks Amelia Gentleman
Poverty tourism: A dose of reality Guides explain the concept—and how to find an excursion right for you Feb. 4, 2008 While the critics of so-called "poverty tourism" say that it exploits people, turning neighborhoods into zoos, the tours' organizers argue that it can raise awareness about poverty, fight stereotypes, and bring money into areas that don't benefit from tourism. ... Good intentions aren't always enough, however, and these excursions should be approached with sensitivity.
Poorism? What Is Inequality Coming To? Posted March 11, 2008 | 03:46 PM (EST) It says something about the extremities of inequality in our world when rich people are now paying money to take tours of poor people.
. UK news media ignores the realities of poverty according to Joseph Rowntree study 10 September 2008 Poverty and the effects of economic exclusion are largely ignored by the UK news media according to a new report by a major research charity. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation today releases a study showing that poverty is only a marginal issue in the news and that journalists rarely explore the causes or consequences.
The media, poverty and public opinion in the UK This report analyses how the media reports UK poverty and its impact on public understanding and opinion. Publication date: 10 September 2008 Published by: Joseph Rowntree Foundation PDF File size: 0.38MB
Poverty is UK's hidden child killer August 24 2008 Government has failed to tackle the epidemic of chronic illness and early deaths among the most disadvantaged in society, says a new report
Poverty triples likelihood of mental health problems Children from disadvantaged families are three times more likely to suffer from mental health problems than those from wealthier families, according to new research.
. "When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry. The poet, too, is not so concerned with describing facts as with creating images" - Niels Bohr
And when it comes to LHC (Large Hadron Collider), language can be used as in Hip-Hop. The rapper, with her percussive verses, is as concerned with describing facts as with creating images:D
Next Stop: The Fourth Dimension, With Large Hadron Collider Experiments How did the universecome to be? ... Can science prove that there are other dimensions? ... The notion of new dimensions is stranger than science fiction, though the possibility of their existence is quite real. Prof. Etzion believes that other dimensions may exist in parallel to ours, but that -- until now -- they were too small for us to experimentally detect. “For the first time we will reach a new energy scale in our lab, the Tera electron volt regime, and we expect to discover new phenomena there,” he says. “At such high energies, we may be able to stimulate particles to jump through dimensions and can measure this by the disappearance of mass or energy, or the appearance of new excited state towers of particles.” Prof. Etzion’s research falls within a branch of theoretical physics known as string theory.
Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll The collider, 14 years and $8 billion in the making, is the most expensive scientific experiment to date. Thousands of physicists from dozens of countries have been involved in building the collider and its huge particle detectors. It is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts — seven times the energy of the next largest machine in the world, Fermilab’s Tevatron — and smash them together.... At stake is a suite of theories called the Standard Model, which explains all of particle physics to date, but which breaks down at the conditions that existed in the earliest moments of the universe. The new collider will eventually reach temperatures and energies equivalent to those at a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. There are many theories about what will happen, including the emergence of a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is hypothesized to endow other particles with mass, or the identity of the mysterious dark matter that provides the invisible scaffolding of galaxies and the cosmos. But nobody really knows for sure, which is part of the fun ... The whole world will be watching.
BBC - Big Bang Day Radio 4 joins CERN on 10 September 2008 as scientists attempt to discover more about the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang. 'Will the Collider be able to prove to scientists that many other dimensions exist as well as ours?' 'What are the possibilities of multiple Big Bangs creating multiple parallel universes?'
BBC > Atom: The Illusion of Reality The final part of Professor Jim Al-Khalili's documentary series about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself, discovers how there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist and finds out that 'empty' space isn't empty at all. Al-Khalili shows how the world we think we know turns out to be a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder universe than which we could have conceived.
